CFPs

CFP Issue 10 – General Issue// Deadline: 15 January 2019

Feral Feminisms, an independent, intermedia, peer-reviewed, and open access online journal, invites submissions from artists, activists, and scholars for our first general submissions issue. We invite contributors to submit work that queers, radicalizes, decolonizes, or otherwise fucks with existing systems of power and dominance. We orientate this issue toward change and against capitalist, nationalist, carceral, and settler colonial systems.

We are interested in all general submissions that fit this CFP, but particularly welcome submissions that address:

Creative practices and processes that interrupt, address, or highlight systems of inequality and power.

Work that defies traditional disciplinary and interdisciplinary expectations within academia including those around sole authorship and traditional article formats.

Work that challenges the expectation that activism is not intellectual work OR that intellectual work cannot be activism.

Send us the work that you think “no, nobody would publish something that radical/off the wall/strange/challenging.” You might be wrong.

Submission Instructions: By January 15, 2019 submit completed pieces to Managing Co-Editors Jae Basiliere and Krista Benson at generalsubmissions[at]feralfeminisms[dot]com. In addition to the completed piece, please also send a 60-word author biography and 100-word abstract as one separate Word document. For more detailed submission guidelines, visit http://www.feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/. Please prepare your submissions using Chicago author date. Feral Feminisms only considers submissions that are not previously published or under review at other journals. Contributors retain copyright of the pieces under Creative Commons licensing.

Publications Access Policy: In the interest of making access to information more free, to challenge commercial publishing, and to encourage authors with limited or no institutional access to draw on academic journals and databases, Feral Feminisms editors will facilitate access to necessary journal articles, book chapters, and books when possible for potential or current authors. If authors need specific manuscripts to complete drafting or revising their pieces, please contact the editors, who will do everything we can to ensure you have access to those materials.

CFP Issue 9 – State Killing: Queer and Women of Color Manifestas against U.S. Violence and Oppression// CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

In this moment, President Donald Trump’s administration is building on a long history of U.S. state violence, entrenching division and devaluing the peoples who have made “America” and who precede its founding. Surviving the state we’re in demands visionary plans for its demise: blueprints to create change and solidarity that do not rely on, or reproduce, the life (and death) worlds the state creates through systemic oppression. Living in a killing state requires strategies for defense, coalition, and community building. The question, then, is how to resist and kill this state by subverting its claims, refusing its orders, and rejecting its phobic fear of others. Rooted in resistance, the manifestas sought for this issue will offer passionate guides that unpack and attack state projects predicated on human devaluation and disposability within U.S. borders or transnationally due to U.S. influence and involvement.

As a feminist genre, manifestas typically make three moves: they chronicle oppression, outline objectives, and confront oppressors to catalyze audiences toward common action. Manifestas offer opportunities to answer Joy James’ call for activist-intellectuals to confront state violence and create visions of social justice, cooperative relations, and radical resistance. Manifestas are responsive to what Kate Eichhorn calls “dirty history”: history that does not follow the legacies and colonized traditions of “reason, meaning, or higher purpose” (2012, 17). Contributions to this issue may be committed to a wide range of queer and women of color (Q/WOC) public forums and expressions. Adela C. Licona observes how feminist zine culture offers occasions to envision an alternative “third-space” that “materialize[s] and reflect[s] borderlands rhetorics through the languages of resistance, opposition, and most importantly, coalition” (2013, 59). Manifestas also display disloyalty to disciplinary norms and deploy unorthodox methods. For instance, epistemic disruptions entangling auto-ethnography, visual rhetoric, and decolonized futurism can draw connections across past, present, and future rebellions and reconstructions. In these ways, manifestas offer to make “meaningful and relevant knowledges, practices, and relations that first imagine and then reconstruct, promote, and represent antiracist agendas and models of social justice and egalitarian social discourses” (Licona, 60).

Working in and outside of the academy, scholars have sought new mediums for contending with the systemic violence of state institutions, including universities. Some of their projects produce scholarship as study, struggle, and play, expanding the boundaries of criticism to the interactive praxis of radical world-making.

This special issue thus calls for manifestas in multiple forms that speak to the complexity of their subjects. For example, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ (2016) Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity jettisons traditional literary criticism and offers a rich, experimental engagement with Hortense Spillers’ (2003) Black, White, and in Color. Similarly, in Electric Arches (2017), Eve L. Ewing combines prose, poetry, and visual art to explore black girlhood as something other than a symptom of violence and trauma. In our view, these texts are fully-fleshed manifestas and manifestations of feminism that defy formality while drawing on black feminist discursive and oral traditions. As a feral form of Q/WOC rhetoric and resistance, we seek manifestas that move between the formal and innovative and will move audiences to act against state violence.

We welcome submissions that take up the ideas above and the manifesta form in relation to the following themes, including but not limited to:

Drawing from diverse experience and expertise—such as literary analysis, activism, Afrofuturism, etc.—to produce blueprints for alternative formations and futures that confound state violence within and beyond U.S. borders

Examining psychological, embodied, spiritual, and generational trauma, stress, healing, and liberation in relation to state violence in the United States or transnationally due to U.S. military, economic, and/or policy interventions and influence

Reimagining resistance that has been co-opted or consumed by the state (e.g., carceral feminism, nonprofit industrial complex, politics as a brand or consumer good, etc.)

Analyzing traditional avenues of interacting with the state (e.g., voting, petitioning, protesting, lobbying, etc.) to interrogate how they open and/or limit opportunities for resistance, redress, and redirection

Creating performances and praxis to foment ethical politics and political engagement

This past year has marked a historical moment with the phrase “rape culture” featured in headlines across Canada, particularly as Jian Ghomeshi’s high profile sexual assault case received the verdict of acquittal. While some feminist criticisms of this verdict have been made public, and the affective dismay has been felt throughout our diverse communities, there remains an absence of a collective critical feminist intervention into not only the handling of the Ghomeshi trial, but also the concept of rape culture writ large. This issue of Feral Feminisms, “Critical Interventions in Rape Culture,” seeks to explore how feminists can critically intervene in rape culture, and the uneven disciplining of sexual assault by institutional, criminal, judicial, and carceral systems.

In 1988, Canadian feminist scholar Susan Sherwin asserted that “patriarchy, or male domination, is the social norm throughout our culture” and that “such dominance has been further reinforced through the various means by which men control women’s sexuality” (137). Sherwin argues that heterosexual rape is one of these primary “mechanisms to reinforce such dominance,” not unlike the international arms race “where small, ‘weaker’ nations find themselves forced to align themselves with a superpower in the hope of achieving protection from the aggression of other nations” (137). Again in 1988, rape culture as a concept emerges in the writing of American scholar Susan Griffin, who argues that: “Our society is a rape culture because it fosters and encourages rape by teaching males and females that it is natural and normal for sexual relations to involve aggressive behavior on the part of males. To end rape, people must be able to envision a relationship between the sexes that involves sharing, warmth, and equality, and to bring about a social system in which these values are fostered” (52). Nora Samaran’s 2016 article, “The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture,” similarly argues that underlying a culture of rape is men’s inability to express a need for intimacy and connection with others.

The parallels between Samaran’s recent concerns and those of Sherwin and Griffin thirty years prior suggest that we are at a curious impasse in 2016, where the feminist (or post-feminist?) concept of rape culture has come to stand in for and obscure a whole host of relations of dominance relating to sexual assault. Yasmin Nair (2014) suggests that conceiving of sexual violence through the framework of a rape culture intersects with and arises from a “culture of confession” that reproduces survivors of rape as neoliberal subjects. This insight begs the question, then, of how does the concept of a rape culture rely on neoliberal notions of subjectivity, self-hood, and traumatic injury that place limitations on how critiques of rape culture might function as resistive tools? How might the increased emphasis on “consent”—positioned as a solution to rape via state, institutional, and media discourses—align itself with the status quo and with gendered, racial, classed, and sexual power relations under neoliberal capitalism? How does the concept of rape culture find belonging within dominant notions of femininity, wealth, and whiteness, and how does this affect the experiences of and legibility of sexual violence that occurs elsewhere and at the intersections of marginality, particularly amongst people who are poor, racialized as non-white, Indigenous, queer, trans, and/or engaged in sex work?

With these questions in mind, this issue of Feral Feminisms seeks critical interventions into rape culture that go beyond the naming of rape culture, and instead interrogate its dynamics, propose alternative forms of resistance, and develop theory that breaks down and specifies its discursive, material, and representative power. Topics and questions may include, but are not limited to historical and contemporary mediations on rape culture in relation to:

We invite contributions that critically interrogate, through a contemporary or historical lens, the relation of rape culture to the questions laid out above, as well as other themes. Please send submissions along with a 60-word author biography, and a 100-word abstract to all three of the guest editors: Nisha Eswaran (eswaranb@mcmaster.ca), Emma McKenna (mckennej@mcmaster.ca), and Sarah Wahab (wahabsa@mcmaster.ca) and to Feral Feminisms (feralfeminisms[at]gmail[dot]com) by 1 April 2017. For detailed submission guidelines please visit: http://www.feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/

Inspired by collections like Joan Nestle’s (1992) The Persistent Desire: A Femme Butch Reader, Chloë Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri’s (2003) Brazen Femme, Ulrika Dahl and Del LaGrace Volcano’s (2008) Femmes of Power, Jennifer Clare Burke’s (2009) Visible: A Femmethology, and Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman’s (2011) Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, amongst other engagements with femme and queer femininities, Queer Feminine Affinities warmly invites written and visual materials that reflect on femme, queer and alternative femininities as an embodied lived experience, identity and imagined community. The collection is particularly interested in reflections that can contribute to, challenge and expand on the established legacies of these wonderfully rich anthologies.

The collection asks to what extent conceptualizations and lived realities of femme, queer, alternative and subversive femininities have travelled and translated along transnational lines of queer inheritances, and where our paths have diverged and our figurations have been reinvented to take fresh forms. Most of all, however, the collection simply aims to provide a space in which a diverse variety of feminine identified voices and perspectives can mingle in creative dialogue, discussing topics that are close to our queer fem(me)inine hearts!

We were delighted to receive an overwhelming and exciting response to our initial call for submissions to “Queer Feminine Affinities.” However, we are still seeking additional submissions on a number of as yet underrepresented topics. With this extended call we specifically welcome work that engages with the following themes. Thus, topics of interest and questions may include, but are not limited to:

Intersectional Femininities

How does femme-ininity intersect with other aspects of embodied experience including:

“Race,” ethnicity, critical whiteness, racisms, and anti-racisms

Dis/abilities, (mental) health and ableism

Class (war), poverty, privilege, precarity, and anti-capitalism

Cultural differences, heritage, custom, language, and faith/religion

Fatness/thinness, fat studies and fat activism

Sex work, porn studies, and sex positivity

Queer, Trans* and non-binary fe(me)ininities

What are the crossovers and relationships between femininity/femme and varied gender identifications including:

Cis or trans* women who identify as feminine or femme

Cis or trans* men who identify as feminine or femme

Non-binary, intersex, and/or genderqueer people who identify as feminine or femme

Masculinity, Androgyny and Butchness

“Femmephobia” or “sissyphobia” within and outside of queer spaces

Disentangling femininity from cis-female identifications

Queer(y)ing Femininities

How do we engage with the implications of uncritically accepting femininity, including:

(Homo)normative femininities

Critical, radical, or queer hetero-femininities

The complexities, problematics, and limitations of (queer) femininities

(Non-)Geographically Located Femininities

What is at stake in femme/femininities that are located either geographically or within other communities including:

Universities in the early 21st century are more than sites of study; increasingly, they are sites of struggle. In the early months of 2015 alone, strikes and occupations have erupted at prominent universities in Canada, the UK, and The Netherlands. Students and faculty have in recent years played leading roles in broader civil society struggles in Chile, Mexico, Turkey, Greece, South Africa, and elsewhere. Many of these struggles are being waged over core issues intrinsic to the university’s identity: commercialization, autonomy, academic freedom, labour rights. These struggles often bear a strong feminist imprint and are indelibly tied to broader and diverse contestations of unjust social structures and hierarchies such as patriarchy, heterosexism, racism, ableism, and on-going colonizations. And they occur against a broader backdrop in which universities find their role and operations increasingly framed by a neoliberal rationality that has ravaged both academic and non-academic workers’ experience of labour in the contemporary university. Much existing research has focused on efforts to chart the transformation of labour in the university under neoliberalism (Brown 2015; Luxton & Mossman 2012; Reimer 2004; Turk 2000), and to analyze these transformations as well as forms of resistance that have emerged in response (Butler 2015; Badiou 2012; Chun 2009; Canaan & Shumar 2008; Ross & Gibson 2006; Hudson et al 1997).

This issue of Feral Feminisms aims to further this work by drawing together ongoing and recent research in this area. It also takes aim at drawing connections across borders, and exploring how processes shaping transformation of the university as a site of labour are linked transnationally. It aims to explore how the resistance movements emerging in response to precarity and neoliberalization of labour at the university–movements aimed at preserving principles of worker dignity, gender justice, academic freedom, freedom of inquiry and expression, democracy and transparency, equity, social justice and accessibility–are linked internationally. Such links are not always formal (although formal exchanges of experiences and tactics do occur) but often manifest through nuanced processes of media consumption, political/social movement-building, and other informal methods of engagement across borders.

The Neoliberal University: Labour, Struggle, and Transformation seeks pieces that examine from a feminist perspective how the university is an increasingly complex and diverse site of labour. This includes the growing complexity of universities as communities of academic labour, and their engagement with both administrative bureaucracies and the state. Yet universities also rely on a large pool of non-academic labour in order to function: janitorial/maintenance staff, administrative assistants, food service providers, security personnel, technicians, and student support staff (who often represent devalued, precaritized, gendered, and racialized forms of work). Universities are embedded in communities, relying on local transit systems as well as housing and service providers within the university’s immediate sphere. While the public image of universities often relies on a division of labour between academic and non-academic staff that typically endows the former with a more privileged status, universities are also sites where these imagined divides are increasingly fluid.

This Special Issue asks: How do academic workers, non-academic workers, communities of workers, and the broader community experience and shape the processes of institutional transformation as well as resistance? This issue seeks to explore the university as a site of labour from a broad perspective, and welcomes submissions that explore the nature and role of non-academic labour in the processes of transformation and resistance outlined here.

We are seeking original research articles offering data, analysis and arguments oriented around these themes, and addressing the questions and issues highlighted below. We also welcome submission of personal and creative contributions–personal narratives, fiction, poetry, art–connected with the themes of this issue.

Themes and questions to consider include:

Emerging forms of resistance: What forms of resistance are emerging against the precarity and disciplining of labour in the university? What is new or innovative about these resistances? In what ways do they build on, replicate, and/or challenge the structures of oppression and resistance from which they have emerged? How do they engage with feminism[s], and how do feminisms engage with them?

Drawing across borders: What connections/influences inherent in the shaping of university labour can be identified across borders? How are pressures to reshape the university as a site of labour linked internationally, and how are these processes mutually constitutive across borders (both within and between states)? How are efforts to resist the precarity and neoliberalization of university labour linked across borders? How do moments of resistance and movement-building influence each other internationally? How do efforts to replicate movements in different geographical/political/cultural communities create and respond to challenges produced by local dissonances? What new questions and languages are produced through these (border-crossing) exchanges and linkages?

Personal is Political, and Political is Personal: How are these struggles personal? How do we as individuals, as communities, as physically embodied individuals, experience the struggles which emerge through universities as sites of labour? How do we reconcile the needs and desires of the individual with the demands of a movement? How are contestations over labour transformations at the university shaped by racism, patriarchy, ableism, ageism, homo/transphobia and other struggles for diversity and social justice?

Labour writ large: What is the role and experience of non-academic labour in the university, in institutional restructurings, and in resistance/protest movements at universities? How are the non-academic communities of labour on which universities rely classed, racialized, and gendered?

One way in which women have been oppressed has been through their relegation to the domestic sphere and through their domestic labour, and so it makes sense to consider women domesticated rather than feral animals. Indeed, in classic works such as “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” and “In and Out of Harm’s Way: Arrogance and Love,” radical feminist theorists Gayle Rubin and Marilyn Frye describe gendering as domestication. More recently, in “After Alice, After Cats,” Jessica Polish notes that, for Kant, women were originally and quite literally domesticated animals for men; for example, Polish argues that women may have been men’s first domesticated animals. Kant writes that woman was initially a mule, “loaded down with his [man’s] household belongings,” and later, with the development of polygamous marriage, became more like a dog in man’s harem—or, as Kant puts it, “kennel.” Polish argues that, for Kant, it was only with the domestication of non-human animals that monogamous marriage or “civilized,” intra-human relations become possible between the sexes. If, following Rubin, Frye, and Polish, to become women was to be domesticated, it would seem that undoing gender, to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase, would mean going feral. Monique Wittig long ago described lesbians as “escapees” from gender. Wittig’s renegade lesbian is no longer a woman; like the avian inmate who flees the farm, or the dog who joins the wolves, she has gone feral.

The feral has also been theorized within Critical Animal Studies. In Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka criticize animal ethicists for focusing exclusively on domesticated and wild animals, ignoring the billions of “liminal” animals who live within human communities without being of those communities or directly subjected to human control. For Donaldson and Kymlicka, liminal animals are in different political relations to humans than domesticated and wild animals, and a different set of moral obligations to these animals is entailed by these relations. Although Donaldson and Kymlicka’s theory is important because it draws the attention of critical animal theorists to a previously ignored category of animal, they arguably subsume ferality into existing neoliberal society in a way that evacuates the feral of its political potential. A more radical approach to thinking the feral within Critical Animal Studies would not domesticate the feral into existing human political categories, but would begin with these liminal animals in order to feralize political theory. In “Taming Ourselves or Going Feral: Toward a Nonpatriarchal Metaethic of Animal Liberation,” for instance, Brian Luke takes up the feminist association of patriarchy with domestication to argue that a nonpatriarchal approach to animal liberation would entail such a feralization of thought.

Queer theorist Jack Halberstam has recently argued that the term “queer” has been domesticated, or is being used interchangeably with ‘gay’ to describe homonormalizing political agendas. For Halberstam, we thus need a new term to do the work that “queer” once did, and he proposes “going wild.” Halberstam argues in Gaga Feminism that we are living in a time of chaos, where the meanings of once stable phenomena such as gender and marriage have become definitionally unstable—things are “going gaga” or “crazy.” Rather than resisting this moment of instability and trying to put definitions back in place, Halberstam argues that now should be a time of (queer) anarchy or “wildness.” Halberstam sees this argument for wildness as building on his earlier argument for embracing failure in The Queer Art of Failure, which takes as its exemplars animated revolting chickens, the anarchic bodies of children, and the failed femininity of butch lesbians. Contra Halberstam, however, “going feral” better describes the situation of moving to a less tamed or untamed state after (failed) domestication, whereas, just as there is no “outside of power” for Foucault, there is arguably no possibility of “going wild.” What we need, then, we suggest, is not so much a rewilding of queer theory as its feralization.

At the same time, this issue seeks to explore the racist, ableist, and class-bound implications of elaborating a theory of the feral. While feral is a provocative concept for thinking a rewilding of queer and feminist theories, it is also a term that has been wielded against marginalized bodies and populations. We thus solicit reflections on the manners in which disabled subjects are seen as feral or out of control, and the ways in which these bodies are domesticated, sequestered, expected to be “patients” and to remain at (or in a) home. We invite speculations on the ways that indigenous peoples and bodies are framed as feral or “savage,” and are expected to be domesticated within the reconciliatory ethos of settler colonialism. We are also interested in exploring the racist routes that ferality traverses—historically, politically, and theoretically.

In the spirit of auto-critique, this special issue also invites challenges to our appropriation of the feral as potentially reflecting white privilege. Does our very willingness to celebrate the feral and to propose ferality reflect racial privilege? Although women, including white women, have been viewed as less than fully human and have been associated with animals, the history of animalizing people of colour of both sexes has arguably been even more brutal. Might it be that we are willing to invite identifications with the feral and cultivations of a feral feminism—despite their strong connotations of animality—because we are not among those people who have been denigrated as beastly, savage, primitive, and uncivilized with the most oppressive effects?

Turning to environmental theory, feminist philosophers such as Claire Colebrook and Joanna Zylinska have begun to grapple with what feminist theory and ethics, respectively, should look like in the Anthropocene. Essayists such as George Monbiot encourage rewilding as a way to reconnect with nature and, in turn, our sense of wonder and enchantment with Earth. As we come to terms with the apparent inevitability of ecological catastrophe and mass human die-outs, is it helpful to theorize the feral as an antecedent to learning to live ferally?

While feminist theorists debate the relative advantages of intersectionalism versus interlocking oppressions as models for understanding how different forms of oppression and the subjectivities they produce coalesce and interact, this issue proposes promiscuous matings of theory as a mark of the feral. Far from domesticated pure-breds whose reproduction is constrained by pre-given agendas, ferals interact with each other as they choose and at the moment, producing mongrels. In developing a feral theory, we thus also call for a mongrelization of thought.

We welcome submissions that take up any of the above ideas or explore ferality and feral animals in other ways. Topics and questions may include, but are not limited to:

Recent literature in feminist, queer, fat, and critical disability theory has drawn attention to the hegemonic nature of dominant time orders and how they have made certain lives unlivable (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005; Love 2009; Freeman 2010; Muñoz 2009). Much of this scholarship has critically argued that the future and futurity have troubling normative force in the present. Alison Kafer (2014) for example, highlights disabled bodies as the “sign of the future of no future” (34). Although dominant time orders structure our social, economic, and political lives in ways that flatten the complexity and richness of lived experiences, these time orders can be resisted and reconstituted. Lee Edelman calls for a refusal of the future, a refusal “of the coercive belief in the paramount value of futurity” (6), while Kafer asks us to imagine “disability and disability futures otherwise” (34). Temporality, then, is a site for considering the ways in which bodies resist normativity. Focusing on how we create, inhabit, and resist dominant time orders, we ask how desiring, bringing forth, and struggling towards particular futures (even when those futures themselves resist futurity) can enact resistances.

This special issue of Feral Feminisms calls for submissions that explore the intersection of embodiment, temporality, and resistance. Time is necessarily embodied and is our opening into meaning, language, community, and resistance politics. How then are bodies that move, desire, communicate, fuck, laugh, stim, stutter, jiggle, give birth, and leak possible openings for more hospitable, generative, and anti-oppressive futures? Resisting dominant norms need not entail an outright refusal of the future, but rather, the refusal of a particular future. How can non-normative embodiments as sites of resistance reimagine and reinhabit rather than simply reject dominant temporal narratives?

Topics and questions may include, but are not limited to:

The temporality of resistance

Phenomenology of non-normative embodiments in relation to dominant temporalities

The racialization of time

The production of temporal narratives though cultural representations

How can time be reinscribed and/or reconstituted in and through embodiment?

Indigenous and/or critical race scholars and activists have raised questions about the anti-colonial and decolonization politics of diasporic people of colour living in white settler colonies. Some key discussions include whether people of colour are settlers, what their place is in the structure of white settler colonialism, and what kinds of anti- and de-colonial alliances they can form with Indigenous peoples in white settler colonies. Many of these conversations are heavily informed by the critiques of anti-racist scholarship put forth by the Mi’kmaw scholar Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua (2005) in their article “Decolonizing Antiracism.” Critiquing anti-racist scholars for failing to ground their critiques in the original and ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples of the lands they now occupy, Lawrence and Dua argue that people of colour are complicit in ongoing processes of settler colonialism and nation-building. While several theorists of colour engaged with this article by examining and challenging their own complicity in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, some also challenged Lawrence and Dua’s arguments by critiquing their conflation of settler colonialism and immigration, and by questioning who is autochthonous to the land and what it means to claim rights based on indigeneity (Sharma and Wright, 2008/09).

With careful attention to semantics and with a firm caution to not metaphorize decolonization (Tuck and Yang, 2012), this special issue of Feral Feminisms calls for submissions that center indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, that explore the ways in which anti-racist theory and practice uphold and sustain colonial discourse, and that imagine social movements, communities, and scholarship that work within a social justice framework in ways that resist the reproduction of colonial dynamics. We encourage submissions that pay close attention to the ways in which multiple histories, violences, borders, spaces, time, race, gender, class, sexualities, and genealogies are mobilized to uphold white settler colonialism. We are also interested in exploring sites of solidarity, resistance, and hope between Indigenous peoples and people of colour. We invite contributors to displace the nation-state by engaging with critical feminist transnational perspective(s) and modes of knowledge production. We also take our cue here from Indigenous feminist writings that theorize Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty as challenges to the borders of white settler colonial states. Conjointly, we trace the lineages of these conversations to the contributions of Black feminists, feminists of colour, transnational feminists, and trans/queer theorists who disrupt the violence of settler colonialism by challenging the gendered and heteropatriarchal organizing of bodies in these white settler states.

Possible questions for exploration for this issue include:

What are some of the common grounds between Indigenous peoples and people of colour in struggles against racism, gender-based violence, poverty, exclusionary immigration policies, labour commodification and exploitation, police violence, the prison-industrial complex, ableist policies and structures, invasions, and wars, that need to be urgently (but ethically) examined?

How are histories and presents of Indigenous peoples in white settler colonies entangled with those of Indigenous peoples of former European colonies, those living within present-day American invasions (outside of the Americas), or those who have been forced on this land through generations of slavery?

How can we trace and resist histories, legacies and violences of anti-Black racism in settler colonial contexts?

How can we centre gender and sexuality in critiques of settler colonialism and white supremacy?

How can we challenge ableism within the nation state as well as in the academy and engage with critical disability theoretical interventions in the making of the settler nation state as well as racial formations?

How does trans theory help understand the making of gender and exclusionary violences in white settler states?

What place do migrants/refugees fleeing political, economic, and social wars – some instigated by the “West” and some from within the postcolonial nations – have in white settler societies?

In what ways do extant imperial and colonial forces operate differently towards these communities in terms of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2002) in determining who is invited into the realm of social life and who, instead, is confined to social death? More urgently, how does “social” death come to be, at its extent, implicated in genocide and concrete loss?

We welcome submissions from all fields that relate to Indigenous studies, social and political theory, critical race theory, anti-racism theory, settler colonialism, postcolonial theory, transnational theory, art and literature, critical disability studies, gender, feminist and women’s studies, trans and queer theory, and equity studies. We extend a hearty invitation to community members and social justice activists who engage in these discussion through their community work or activist endeavours. And, we clearly recognize that these categories of authors overlap and intertwine as resistance and survival are breathed in all spaces that we inhabit and travel in, and thus welcome contributions that challenge “academic writing” and the academic-industrial complex.

Special Submission Instructions: With your submission, please include a blurb (max. 300 words) stating your connection to the work you are submitting. While the blurb will not impact decision-making, it is meant to invite contributors to engage with the relationships between epistemology and knowledge production by evaluating their own social location as knowledge producers. To take the task of decolonizing knowledge seriously, it is imperative to question processes of knowledge production, creation, and distribution. Further, these blurbs will help the editors to better reflect on the submitted pieces and seek to place them in critical conversations with each other.

Prior to the recent Affective Turn in critical and cultural theory, feminist theory and philosophy had already been critiquing the role of rationality and the exclusion of emotion in Western thought. Elspeth Probyn (1993) argued for the inclusion of experiential accounts in understanding the relationship between feminist epistemology and ontology; and, Alison Jaggar (1989) worked to restore inquiry as the wisdom of love to Western epistemology by validating emotional acumen as a highly developed skill. For Jaggar, the one who feels different is an emotional outlaw. Emotional outlaws are a kind of precursor, grandmother or godmother, to Ahmed’s (2010) affect aliens: the feminist killjoy, who is angered by the sexist joke, or the melancholic migrant, who longs for something lost, or the unhappy queer, whose happiness is already impossible. Claire Hemmings (2012) has argued that being outside of emotional norms can offer a kind of unification, where affective dissonance is a starting point for feminist politics and can encourage affective solidarity.

But what of a return to previous conceptualizations of feeling in understanding the feminine and feminism? Luce Irigaray (1991), for example, writes of the erasure of the figure of the female lover and the simultaneous loss of the expression of feminine carnality, female divinity, and the representation of the female body. In light of these and other recent works (Cvetkovich, 2012; Grosz, 2011), how might we consider moving forward by taking into consideration feminine feelings?

Feminine Feelers are flustered, fraught, and feral. Feminine Feelers recall feminine modalities of feeling that have gone otherwise. Feminine Feelers ponder the position of emotional misfits such as female mystics, poets, artist, grandmothers, godmothers, cyborgs, golems, lovers, and Other(ed) figures. Feminine Feelers also highlight moments in feminist thought which illuminate the role of feelings and accounts of the body. What challenges does the turn to affect pose to feminist theory? How might we cultivate the sensory in order to tune into what is going on? Is the female an outsider, or is the feminist the outsider? How does outsider status offer a critical distance from cultural and emotional hegemonies? Must this distance be maintained in order to preserve difference?

This special issue of Feral Feminisms seeks to bring together scholars, activists, and artists to think through and feel through categories. Submitted contributions may include papers, visual art, film, poetry and literary pieces. Submissions are encouraged to address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

What gets you off? Desire is a slippery concept, difficult to hold or describe, and certainly not consistent or interchangeable. An insatiable yearning for some is for others abhorrent and deserving of reprimand. The social complexities of perversion are therefore always in flux, influencing diverse manifestations of sexuality and its censorship. According to Freud’s early formulations on the two principles of psychic functioning, and later developed in his writings on the death drive, pleasure and unpleasure are intimately bound. Our primary drive encompasses both the unpleasure of an increase in excitation and the pleasure of its release. In other words, an individual’s relationship to unencumbered indulgence continually grapples with its denial. This fundamental tension also resonates beyond psychoanalysis, in feminist genealogies, as an ambivalence towards BDSM and “perverse” sexualities. Echoed in Carole Vance’s influential anthology, Pleasure and Danger, and the ongoing battles of the sex wars, feminist sexuality encompasses both enjoyment and suffering wrapped tightly around the politics of desire. This apparent contradiction of painful enjoyment also weaves throughout BDSM sexuality itself, where the lines between violence, sex, and love begin to blur.

This special issue of Feral Feminisms aims to complicate, untame, queer and radicalize tumultuous legacies of pleasure and unpleasure by reflecting upon the current intersections of feminist desire and BDSM sexuality. Topics of inquiry may include, but are not limited to: